I’m back in Bali after a trip to Anarchapulco and Chicago to pick up my cats. It was my first time back in the United States in over a year. Instead of a warm welcome back to my birth country I was promptly detained by a CBP officer and put in holding room while they ran a background check and attempted to obtain personal information.

After declining to give CBP my address in Bali and questioning them as to whether or not I was under arrest they were kind enough to inform me I was free to go at any time but that my passport belonged to the U.S. government and wasn’t my property.

It would appear surveillance states like post-9/11 USA don’t appreciate having their own citizens outside their visibility. That certainly wouldn’t suit the “Deep State” if such a thing existed now would it? The experience was very disheartening to say the least.

One of the largest perceived drawbacks to creating a SPA or other Rich Internet Application is that they’re not SEO friendly or very accessible. With the advent of technologies such as ARIA, HTML5 and Node.js, things are changing. Web apps are becoming more usable and accessible, though also making them crawlable and highly performant is a formidable challenge.

I recently heard a talk from Peter-Paul Koch of QuirksMode on the touch events in mobile at the orbitz.com office in Chicago. During his presentation PPK gave us a great sound bite to use when dealing with the 300ms delay many touch devices use for capturing double-tap (zoom) events:

Stick with click.

Peter-Paul Koch

Under stick with click devs are discouraged from hijacking ontouchstart to make click events occur without noticeable delay. And though a good rule of thumb I view it as more of a best practice than a hard-and-fast rule.

Here’s why…

Though modal dialogs are not a new concept in UI design, the number of homegrown  Lightbox clones ( source) appearing on the Web since major JavaScript libraries like Prototype and jQuery hit the scene has been staggering. Unfortunately, many of the clones developed leave some key usability considerations unaddressed, and struggle with common problems in accessibility.

Some key usability features that should be considered during creation of a Web-based modal dialog include (1) manage focus and allow tab navigation (2) disable elements outside the modal dialog (3) give users an out and (4) provide graceful error recovery.